On Sun, May 03, 2009 at 01:50:59PM -0700, David Miller wrote:
> >> I don't find garbage like this in Ubuntu and Fedora-sparc. Why?
> >> Because those developers contact me when they need help or need a
> >> problem fixed.
> >>
> >> End of story.
> >
> > Doesn't that mean that they encounter a fairly small amount of
> > non-distro-specific sparc-related problems? Otherwise I don't see how
> > that procedure can scale.
>
> Are you really this blind?
>
> Assume there were 100 sparc supporting distributions. What scales
> better? Having me on 100 fucking mailing lists looking for things or
> having those sparc dist maintainers contact me or this mailing list
> when something specific comes to their attention?
>
> You tell me.
Yes, that clearly wouldn't make sense. The point I'm trying to make is that
there aren't *nearly* as many places to watch, otherwise you would have run
into the same problem before. Just because your previous few contacts worked
one way, that doesn't mean that all the others would do the same.
> > Neither Ubuntu nor Fedora seem to distribute sparc versions as mainstream,
> > which would seem to explain why they aren't seeing enough problems for
> > these kinds of issues ever to escalate.
>
> Ubuntu did. And both the Fedora and Ubuntu sparc folks sit on
> a sparc developer IRC channel and have direct access to me 24 hours
> a day if they want to ask something or get something tested.
>
> You're being dense and bringing up scarecrows to dismiss my
> fundamental argument. Which is that it doesn't make sense, nor scale,
> for me to follow what ever dist in the world does with my work.
That's fine, but the issue came up when you actually noticed what they do
with your work, and complained. If you can't normally follow what they do,
then just don't do it, and let them work to clean up any bugs that happen
to them, what's wrong with that?
Sure, it would probably be better for you if they adjusted to your own
development model, and relied on you for every change that they want done,
and didn't object to any of your recommendations, but it's free software,
they choose to do things bit differently, what with all the separate lists,
BTS, installer, and ultimately separate users.
Their lack of full conformance to your standards isn't meant to be an
annoyance to you, simply the observation of their own local standards, where
people are encouraged to try and fix users' problems without engaging the
upstream maintainers every time. Yes, sometimes it fails, but in general it
seems to be working. It certainly seems to work in this case, where Debian
still remains one of the few living sparc linux distributions out there.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.